Asus ZenFone 4 Selfie DC Review

Asus ZenFone 4 Selfie Dual Camera

Phones with specialized selfie cameras are the new trends these days. With every manufacturer wanting a piece of the pie, we have a flurry of devices flooding the market from every manufacturer out there. Today we have one such device from ASUS, presenting the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera.

Coming at a sub 15K price point, the Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera competes with the likes of Vivo Y66, Gionee A1 Lite, and Oppo A57. Other options include the Mi A1, Moto G5S and Nokia 6. Like its big brother the Selfie Pro, the Zenfone 4 Selfie (ZD553KL) comes with a dual-camera setup in the front but with lower image resolutions. We had the chance of playing with the Selfie DC for a few days and here are our impressions on it.

Build and Design

The phone comes with a metal unibody design and very lightweight weighing around 150 Gms. The front comes with a 5.5 inch FULL HD panel which is a tad disappointing since most of the phones under 10000 comes with a full-HD panel. Above the display, you have the dual camera setup with the earpiece and LED flash. The fingerprint sensor sits under the display and is flanked by the back button and app switcher, however, they do not have any backlight.

On the left side, you have the volume rocker along with the power button while the left has dual nano-SIM card slots and a dedicated microSD card slot. The microUSB port is at the bottom, whereas the 3.5mm audio socket is on the top.

Camera Setup and impressions

The key features of the Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera are the front dual camera setup. The primary one is a 20MP sensor with aperture f/2.0, and it is being supplemented by an 8MP sensor with aperture f/2.4.

We had a bit of fun with the camera, although our main goal was to test out the phone’s performance as a whole and not solely depend on the camera alone(this is TechARX after all). Check out the camera samples below while we give you our impressions of the quality.

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The front camera is pretty decent in normal mode as the sensor can capture enough details and skin tone. However, things kinda go for a toss when the wide-angle mode is activated, the photos look washed out and lacking details. Same happens in portrait selfie mode. Coming indoors we start to see some problems, although they might not be much of a deal breaker to all. In standard mode, the photos are decent but come with some lack of detail and a reddish tinge on the skin. Selfies look pretty nice and the camera adds some beauty filters on top to smooth out blemishes etc.

Performance

Under the hood, the Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 octa-core SoC (Eight Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz). Paired with Adreno 505 GPU, 4GB of RAM and 64GB onboard storage the phone performs smoothly most of the time with a good battery life. However, with competitors like Redmi Note 4 and Mi A1 coming with Snapdragon 625, the price-performance ratio is a bit disappointing.

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On the software front, the phone runs Naugat 7.1.1 with ZenUI 4.0 on top. The refreshing change was that Asus decided to do away with all the bloatware they used to bundle. Instead, they give Google apps such as Docs, Drive, Calendar, Gmail, Keep, Duo, Photos, Play Music, Maps, and Messages.

There are some build in apps that can be deactivated if needed like Asus WebStorage, Weather, and Go2Pay. One notable addition is the new Mobile manager, where you can check battery stats, the amount of RAM consumed, data usage, battery modes, clear cache and also manage security and permissions.

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Performance is overall decent and exceeds our expectations. We ran the phone through our usual gauntlet of 3DMark, Geekbench, and Antutu and the phone doesn’t really disappoint. The only point where it struggles is with heavy gaming and live video streaming where the phone lags a bit and warms up. However, for normal day to day usage and selfie-taking the phone chugs along happily.

Verdict

The Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera is a selfie-centric smartphone which is decent for the price. There are other alternatives but none of them makes the Asus product completely useless and it has a place of its own. If selfie-taking is not ur priority you can look at other alternatives like the Mi A1 with stock android or the Motorola Moto G5S. Otherwise, this is a pretty good phone in its own right and should be shortlisted if you are looking for a smartphone in sub 16k price point.